Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/190

184 one, perhaps, in which there is the least individuality of the same nature. The latter fact would be extraordinary, could it not be referred to the religious discipline that so much influenced the colonists, and which in a measure supplied the place of law. In communities in which private acts became the subject of publick parochial investigation, it followed as a natural consequence, that men lived under the constant corrective of publick opinion, however narrow, provincial, or prejudiced. This feature of the American character, therefore, is to be ascribed, in part, to the fanaticism of our ancestors, and, in part, to the natural tendency in democracies to mistake and augment the authority of the publick.

"THEY SAY."

"They say," is the monarch of this country, in a social sense. No one asks "who says it," so long as it is believed that "they say it." Designing men endeavor to persuade the publick, that already "they say," what these designing men wish to be said, and the publick is only too much disposed blindly to join in the cry of "they say."

This is another consequence of the habit of defering to the control of the publick, over matters in which the publick has no right to interfere.

Every well meaning man, before he yields his faculties and intelligence to this sort of dictation, should first ask himself "who" is "they," and on what authority "they say" utters its mandates.